Chapter 7
Father's Judgment
The spectral image of his father looms in the corner, his face a mask of stern disapproval. Stephen sees himself as a boy, failing to meet some unspoken expectation, and the vision amplifies his deepest insecurities. He replays moments of perceived failure, each one a fresh lash from his father's ghost. The drugs twist these memories into damning evidence of his worthlessness. The weight of his father's silent judgment presses down on him, a familiar burden made unbearable by his current state. He feels like a child again, lost and terrified, seeking approval he’ll never receive.
The stale air of Room 143 clung to Stephen like a shroud, thick with the ghosts of stale smoke and something far more acrid, something that smelled of desperation and decay. He huddled in the armchair, the cracked faux leather cool against his sweat-slicked skin, the cheap bourbon a molten river burning a familiar, unwelcome path down his throat. The meth, a relentless, buzzing tide, had receded just enough for the edges of his vision to sharpen, for the shadows in the corners of the room to coalesce. And in one of those shadows, a figure began to solidify.
It was his father.
Not the father he knew in his last, withered years, frail and defeated, but the father of Stephen’s childhood – broad-shouldered, his jaw set in that immutable line of disapproval. The spectral image was unnervingly clear, a projection from the deepest recesses of Stephen’s tortured mind, yet it felt as solid as the peeling wallpaper behind him. His father’s eyes, usually a sharp, assessing blue, were now dark pools of judgment, fixed on Stephen with an intensity that made his stomach clench.
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